In the League of Legends rumors have circulated in recent days about an exploit regarding the champion Poppy. The Yordle champ could kill opponents from the safety of her own base practically instantaneously. Some victims complain that they were banned from LoL because they had such poor kill statistics that the system assumed they were intentionally playing badly.
This is the glitch: The hammer-wielding champion Poppy, a Yordle, is actually a cute little thing. But a new glitch turned the blue gnome into a killing machine.
Poppy could use her ability Q, the Hammer Shock, globally across the map. Normally, the skill is spatially limited. But when Poppy used the rune-modified ability “Hexflash” at exactly the right moment to blink forward a bit when the gates opened, she could use Q anywhere on the map without moving.
A player with Poppy could stay in their own base and repeatedly kill minions, enemy champions, or anything else without moving.
According to users, the basic glitch can be used not only with Poppy but also with some other champions: However, the exploit is particularly nasty with Poppy’s hammer.
This is what it looked like in extreme cases: The well-known exploit expert Vandiril has published a video in which a Poppy gets over 500 kills in 15 minutes. While the opposing team can’t get out of their base, Poppy accumulates more and more kills and gold, making her stronger and stronger.
The video displays screenshots showing how Poppy achieves numerous kills in this manner with a perfect KDA – no wonder, as she is not moving out of the base. It is particularly nasty in the video because Poppy is also supported by Yuumi, the parasite buff cat in LoL, which Europeans love but Koreans do not.
At the end of the extremely unfair video, Poppy stands at 510-0-15.
Players complain about being banned as victims
This makes things tricky: Some users complain on reddit that they became victims of the exploit and subsequently got banned because they had such absurdly poor numbers, even though they couldn’t help it.
It is said that Riot only looks at the stats, sees terrible values like 33 deaths with 0 kills, and bans users because it seems they have obviously given up on the game.
It is considered a form of “trolling, when one plays that poorly. This is called “inting” – short for “intentional feeding,” intentionally feeding the opponents. The world-class player Uzi was once punished for inting.
This is how Riot responds: Riot has become aware of the bug. They have announced a hotfix. For the moment, the Hexflash rune is temporarily locked. However, the actual bug is still in the game.
According to an employee from the LoL team, Riot will likely fix the basic bug in patch 10.13 (via reddit).
Riot has not yet commented on the apparently automated bans of the victims.
Update 27.6.: With a week’s delay, there is now a statement from Riot Games regarding the exploit and the banned victims: Finally there is info on the nasty Poppy exploit that banned innocent victims
515 kills is a lot, but they came about in a completely dishonorable way. Even higher is the record number of a Nunu player in LoL. He managed to die 700 times in one match. This is also a dishonorable and quite hollow record:
Player dies 700 times in a LoL match, breaks an utterly hollow death record
